Virgle Osborne
The perpetuation of the private water ski lake behind the deadbeat and long-ago condemned Winchester Dam is apparently the hill Oregon State Representative Virgle Osborne is willing to die on.
To this end, Osborne and fellow Republican constituents, State Senator David Brock Smith, and Oregon Representatives Court Boice and Alex Skarlatos, are holding a town hall at the Roseburg City Hall, 900 SE Douglas Avenue in Roseburg, at 6:00 pm, Friday, April 18, 2025. The public is encouraged to attend.
On Wednesday, March 19, 2025, Osborne met with Governor Kotek, Senior Natural Resources Advisor Geoff Huntington, Deputy Legislative Director Morgan Gratz-Weiser, Natural Resources Policy Advisor Chandra Alena Ferrari, and Representatives Mark Owens (R) and Ken Helm (D), to discuss HB 3728.
HB 3728, innocuously titled “Related to dams,” is sponsored by Rep. Virgle Osborne and State Senator David Brock Smith. The bill “directs the Water Resources Department to study topics related to the Winchester Dam,” and is currently in the House Committee On Agriculture, Land Use, Natural Resources, and Water.
Osborne stated in a February 19, 2025 press release posted to his Facebook page:
“This bill will create a fish ladder that is ‘state of the art’! while preserving the fish and lamprey habitat above the dam. The dam will generate hydro-electricity which is considered ‘Green’ energy in our states green energy plan. It will also create a roadmap of future dams and reason to add them and power local municipalities. This will LOWER your power bill since the energy will be local!”
Osborne’s assertion that the Winchester Dam can be rebuilt as a hydroelectric dam is mere hyperbole. He presumes Oregonians aren’t smart enough to understand why the Winchester Dam’s only function since 1969 has been as a private water ski lake for a few dozen privileged speedboat owners.
Winchester Dam is only 17-feet tall—too high for wild fish to jump but too low for high-capacity electricity production, which requires both flow and hydraulic head. But if the height of the dam is raised for greater capacity, this will raise the level of the lake and lakefront homeowners will lose acreage and, by extension, property value.
Virgle Osborne knows there’s no way WWCD Board of Directors are ever going to let that happen.
Despite the simple facts of physics and capitalism outlined in the previous paragraph, Osborne claims that the Trump administration will provide federal funds to rebuild the infamous Winchester Dam which, according to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW), is the worst manmade obstacle to fish on any river in the state, and widely recognized as the most dangerous and illegal dam in Oregon.
HB 3728 directs the Oregon Water Resources Department (OWRD)—the same agency that condemned the dam in 1976—to “study the feasibility, costs and environmental impacts of:”
(a) Turning the Winchester Dam into an operating dam that would provide
hydroelectricity for the region.
“(b) Installing a state-of-the-art fish screen or by-pass device in or around the Winchester
Dam.
(2) The department shall submit a report on the study in the manner provided by ORS
192.245, and may include recommendations for legislation, to the interim committees of the
Legislative Assembly related to natural resources no later than September 15, 2026.
Ironically, the WWCD is presently suing the OWRD for ordering the dam owners to stop storing 91-acre-feet of water over their legal allotment, which adds exponentially more pressure behind the bowed and uninsurable dam—a dam that OWRD described half a century ago as “being considered as temporary in nature” and that “either reconstruction or removal of the dam would be necessary.”
But critics decry Osborne’s bill as a means to delay the WWCD’s response to ODFW’s September 17, 2024, Notice of Noncompliance order to build a brand new fish ladder at the Winchester Dam. They characterize Osborne’s HB 3728 as a ruse to make Oregon taxpayers pick up the $80-$100 million tab to replace the crumbling 450-foot dam and its worst-in-the-state 80-year-old fish ladder so the WWCD members can keep their private water ski lake, at the exclusion of the public.
Readers unfamiliar with the recent work of their elected Douglas County representatives will be interested to know that, as this article goes to press, Osborne, Boice, and Skarlatos, supporters of the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service, are actively working to pass Senator Brock Smith’s surprisingly unwelcome SB 210—legislation terminating Vote-By-Mail in Oregon. Thousands of Oregonians submitted letters opposing Brock Smith’s long-shot attempt to repeal the state’s decades-old and very popular mail voting law and Brock Smith wound up with egg on his face.
Oregonians have voted entirely by mail since 2000, after nearly 70% of voters approved switching to mail ballots in 1998. But Court Boice, who apparently does not respect the wishes of more than two thirds of the voters told The Oregonian on March 31, 2025, “The folks that I represent, the majority, want voting and Election Day to be about responsibility, not about convenience.”
It’s an open secret at the state capital that Brock Smith and Osborne are in the pocket of Ryan Beckley, president of the Winchester Water Control District (WWCD) Board of Directors, owners of the 135-year-old derelict Winchester Dam.
Constituents in Salem refer to Brock Smith and Osborne as “Beckley’s errand boys.”
The governor’s office is well aware that Osborne’s bill is merely a performative tactic to buy more time for the dam owners. They know the WWCD Board of Directors has repeatedly demonstrated that they would rather sue state agencies than comply with state laws and regulations. They know that Osborne and Brock Smith serve as the WWCDs legislative lobbyists in Salem, working diligently to ensure that the taxpayers—and not the dam owners—absorb the costs and liabilities of rebuilding the dam without gaining access to the private water ski lake.
The Winchester Dam may well be the last dam in America built of pressure treated wood, creosote treated wood—construction materials prohibited from use in drinking water. And yet the raw water intake for 37,700 Douglas County residents is only 50-feet downstream from the dam.
In 2022, Ryan Beckley, owner of TerraFirma Foundation Systems, persuaded the WWCD Board of Directors to award the Winchester Dam repair contract to TerraFirma without soliciting competitive bids—a questionable business practice, at best.
In this way, Beckley managed to perpetrate the biggest fish kill an Oregon river in 2023 in which more than 550,000 wild migratory native fish were needlessly slaughtered.
Beckley is also responsible for a long list of egregious permit violations incurred during so-called “repairs” of Winchester Dam in August 2023. His blunders racked up more than $50 million in fines and noncompliance orders (as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in related legal fees) which must be paid by the 100 WWCD members whose homes surround the private water ski lake behind the dam.
But there is a way to permanently prevent future permit violations, fines, lawsuits, fish kills, and ongoing contamination of drinking water.
The Winchester Dam can be removed—and the dam owners won’t have to pay the $3 – $6 million cost of tearing it down and hauling it away.
A offer to permanently remove the Winchester Dam “at little or no direct cost to the District [WWCD]” and to “end ongoing harm to fisheries and water quality in the North Umpqua River” was sent to the WWCD Board of Directors on April 1, 2020.
The letter was signed by the leaders of Steamboaters, North Umpqua Foundation, Umpqua Watersheds, Umpqua Valley Fly Fishers, Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association, Northwest Guides and Anglers Association, Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman’s Associations, Oregon Wild, Port Orford Sustainable Seafood, Rogue Flyfishers, Pacific Rivers, Native Fish Society, Cascadia Wildlands, American Whitewater, and McKenzie Flyfishers.
When the Oregon Water Resources Department ordered the WWCD to repair the dilapidated and leaking Winchester Dam, the WWCD Board of Directors didn’t use this opportunity to accept the standing offer to have the dam removed at no cost to them.
Rather, in a graphic example of the pathology of wealth and power, the 100 WWCD homeowners collectively decided to spend more than $3 million of the WWCD homeowners’ money to repair the dam, in order to retain control of their private water ski lake—a lake which is only used by a minority of WWCD homeowners.
And now the dam leaks exponentially worse than it did before Beckely’s attempted August 2023 “repairs” of the dam.
Groups like WaterWatch of Oregon are experts at dam removal. They took down the dams on the Rogue River a few years ago. Unlike Ryan Beckley, who, in 2023, “dewatered” the North Umpqua River, blocking passage for 33 days and killing 550,000 fish, WaterWatch has a proven track record removing dams without incurring permit violations or stopping fish passage for one minute.
Virgle Osborne is well aware of the standing offer to take down the dam. But he actively encourages his squadron of internet trolls to denounce this no-risk offer at every opportunity.
Osborne’s minions argue that these environmental groups don’t actually have the money for the dam removal in the bank, and so claim the offer is bogus. According to one of Osborne’s flunkeys, who uses the Facebook handle Ashley Roachclip, “I need you like minds [sic] people to join me in saving the dam… I am in communication with of Rep. Virgil [sic] Osborne, and he has made it clear, the court of public opinion is crucial.”
Osborne and his supporters refuse to acknowledge that dozens of private foundations, and government state and federal agencies regularly provide funds to remove deadbeat dams.
And no dam in Oregon is as deadbeat as the Winchester Dam. It is, in fact, a slow-moving ecological disaster.
Condemned in 1976, the dam is rated a “high hazard” by the Oregon Water Resources Department—meaning the agency expects “loss of life” when the dam fails.
Nevertheless, Virgile Osborne and his Republican confederates work tirelessly to keep the dam from being removed.
Osborne unabashedly turns his back on working people while standing up for the rights of the wealthy and the privileged—like the WWCD members.
For example, the Teamsters Local 324 union filed 10 unfair labor practices against Bigfoot Beverages last September. The workers have been on strike for more than six months in one of the longest strikes in Oregon history. On February 28, 2025, Osborne threw them under a bus, crossing the proverbial picket line and accepting “blood money”— a $1,000 “contribution” from the union-busting Oregon Soft Drink Pac of which Bigfoot Beverages is a member.
So much for solidarity.
One wonders how inexpensively Ryan Beckley and the WWCD obtain the services of Osborne and Brock Smith as errand boys at the state capital?
